this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.

Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.

The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.

i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.

totally sad.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yet one litre of oil can contaminate over a million litres of water.

I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can't find it.

While I can't speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it's very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it's TREATED water that's being released. That means they have a treatment system (there's a fucking rabbit hole and half...) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone 'yolo pump the water into the ocean'.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should've been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t understand why people think concentrating it and keeping large quantities on-site is preferable to heavily diluting and releasing it. A giant vat of radioactive water sounds like another disaster waiting to happen.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because they don't believe that they've removed the heavy metals that end up in the food web and sitting in the littoral area seabed until it's picked up by lifeforms again. Tritium dilutes, but fission products do not.

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.

I asked ppl there "is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?" And most of them were like "it's not a common occurrence but it's not inherently dangerous and it's not that big of a deal"

To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (22 children)

Its also classic anti-nuclear power FUD.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago

they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If their reporting of the quantity of tritium is accurate, India's candu style plants release more incidentally than this will.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Which is what the experts have been saying since the beginning, but the anti-nuclear propagandists explicitly ignore the experts.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

The power of the sun..... in the palm of my hand

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Probably because the octopuses used it all for their science experiments. It's a scientific fact that octopuses hoard tritium. Source: Spider-man 2.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Dangit, now how am I gonna get my piscine superpowers/fish shaped tumors?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Fantastic news! so many people are so afraid of the word "nuclear", and don't understand how large of a volume the ocean is. the lethal dose of Fentanyl is like the size of a grain of rice. Put all of the known legal and illegal volume of fentanyl into the ocean and it would be undetectable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

The ocean is 1.335 × 10^21 litres. That number is stupid big. There are 7.5 × 10^18 grains of sand on Earth. If every person in Japan flushed a litre of the reactor water down their toilet, it would be diluted to nothing in no time at all.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Sample size: 64

Also, are there other things like Caesium-137 that pose a risk?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not really. This video by Kyle Hill does an amazing job at explaining it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

This video by Kyle Hill

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Cs-137 and other fission and activation products can be largely removed by treatment. H-3 is a bit trickier since it literally is part of the water. Luckily it's a fairly weak beta emitter with a relatively short half life so causes very, very little long term harm.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

People have been far more concerned about the efficacy of the ALPS system at extracting other contaminants than they are about tritium contamination. The ALPS system is unproven and the wastewater they're releasing would be pretty toxic as far as other radioactive isotopes is concerned if the ALPS system isn't doing it's job perfectly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I like this but would rather see a multi country coordinated oceanic study. We're all in this together.

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